1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a printing system and a printing method for enabling a particular printer to be selected from among many printers connected to a host computer. The present application is based on Japanese Application Nos. Hei. 9-164281 and Hei. 10-2039 which are incorporated herein by reference.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a printing system comprising printers connected to a host computer can be constructed by using a communication network such as a LAN (Local Area Network). In such a printing system, the user must select one printer to use for printing from among many printers. Thus, the user selects a printer, which has been determined by the user as optimum, from among the many printer icons displayed through a GUI (Graphics User Interface) of the host computer.
The user can select any desired printer from among the printers connected to the network and command the printer to print. However, the printers differ in print engine type such as ink jet or laser, color print function availability, print speed, and print resolution. Therefore, the user needs to understand the specifications and functions of the printers before selection. For example, to print a color document for presentation, a color printer needs to be selected or, to execute an urgent trial print, the user needs to select a fast printer which is closeby.
If a small number of printers are connected to the network, the user can keep track of the specifications of the available printers rather easily. However, if a large number of printers are connected to the network or a printer is replaced, it becomes difficult for the user to accurately keep track of the specifications, functions, installation locations, etc., of the printers.
Therefore, an increasingly growing number of users utilize only a specific printer to which they happen to be familiar, although various printers can be used. If the specific printer which a user always utilizes is busy, the user tends to wait until the desired busy printer becomes idle even though other available printers exist. Further, if it becomes necessary to execute a special print that cannot be performed by the specific printer that the user normally uses, the user must find another printer. In this case the user tends to devote a lot of time and effort to checking a large number of printers for the desired specifications and performance and to selecting the printer provided with all the required functions.
In addition, in recent years, documents have been increasingly diversified, thus conventional printing of the whole document at one printer is a wasteful operation and lowers the printing efficiency of the printing system. For example, when a document contains some color graphics data pages, a color printer must be selected even if most of the document is monochrome text data. Likewise, when high-resolution image data is contained in a part of a document, a high-resolution printer must be selected even if most of the document is text data that can be printed at low print resolution. In summary, since a high-level function printer must be selected for specific print pages, print jobs may concentrate on a specific printer, and thus, efficiency of the entire network printing system lowers.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide a printing system and a printing method that can select an optimum printer for printing from among the printers connected to a host computer and enable effective use of the printers without the need for the user to keep track of the performance and specifications of available printers. It is another object of the invention to provide a printing system and a printing method which enable improvement in print efficiency by selecting an optimum printer for each print page. Other objects and advantages of the invention will be apparent from the following detailed description.
The present invention provides a printing system comprising a plurality of printers and a host computer that can selectively drive the printers. User information retention means retains user information concerning printing which is set by a user and printer information retention means retains printer information concerning print environments of the printers. Printer selection means selects a printer which satisfies the selection criteria from among the printers based on the user information retained in the user information retention means and the printer information retained in the printer information retention means and controls the host computer so as to drive the selected printer.